Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Marc Andreessen is full of it

Okay. Probably not, but he definitely spat out the revenue generating potential of Facebook, because he had to right at that moment. Here's the transcript from his interview with Charlie Rose. BTW, very inspiring interview overall. Highly recommended spending the time to watch the whole interview.

MARC ANDREESSEN: The fallback position is to just take normal advertising. And ifFacebook just turned on the spigot for normal advertising today, it wouldbe doing over $1 billion in revenue. So it’s much more a matter of long-term strategy. The company has got (INAUDIBLE) cash...

CHARLIE ROSE: So if they wanted to make a lot of money instantly, itcould.

MARC ANDREESSEN: Yes. Oh, very easily. It could sell out the homepage, and it would start making just a gigantic amount of money. Yes, sothere’s just tremendous potential in it, and it’s just a question ofexactly how they choose to exploit it.

Monetizing on social media is something that many startups are trying to tackle and will require some real innovaitons to make this happen. Yes, Google figured it out with their search engine platform. Facebook, with 175 million active users with half of them using Facebook daily, is a huge business. It's just amazing that Facebook turned into this monstrous internet giant in less than 5 years.

Selling out the hompage? Are you kidding me? Since when marketers are willing to give Facebook billions of dollars when they know that non-targeted online advetising is a waste of money?

Will people click through and convert to sales?

Oh yeah, by the way, when was the last time you went through the Facebook homepage?

Marc is a legend, and I respect him very much. I just wish he just never said anything about the non-potential of Facebook on national TV. What's wrong with simply saying, "We are in the process of figuring out the magic" (which he did) or even a humble, "We don't know"?